Astra Credit Companies eyes 5 percent profit growth

PT ASTRA SEDAYA FINANCE - JAKARTA. Astra Credit Companies (ACC), the country’s leading auto financing consortium, predicts its loan disbursement will grow between 7 and 10 percent this year up to Rp 27 trillion, while its profit will grow 5 percent to Rp 1.3 trillion (US$92.3 million), bringing to an end a four-year slump.

ACC chief finance officer Hendry Christian Wong told reporters the capital of Rp 27 trillion would be secured from internal funds (50 percent), bank loans (25 percent) and a combination of joint financing and bond sales (25 percent).

The consortium’s largest constituent, PT Astra Sedaya Finance, issued Rp 2.2 trillion worth of bonds just last month. “We have growth potential even though industry growth has been poor,” said Hendry during the launch of the company’s acc.one mobile application at The Westin Jakarta hotel.

Hendry was alluding to the slump in domestic car sales since 2015, when growth slipped 16 percent from 1.2 million in 2014 to 1 million in 2015 following a nationwide economic slowdown, according to data from the Association of Indonesian Automotive Manufacturers (Gaikindo).

Gaikindo’s latest data show that sales grew 7 percent to 1.15 million cars last year.

Gaikindo deputy chairman Jongkie Sugiarto announced two weeks ago that he expected domestic sales to remain stagnant at 1.1 million this year due to high interest rates and low purchasing power.

ACC, as an auto financer, experienced a similar dip in profit during the slowdown from Rp 1.2 trillion in 2014 to Rp 1 trillion in 2015, and profit has yet to recover to the pre-slowdown level of 2017, according to its latest annual report.

Nevertheless, Hendry said the company managed to keep the nonperforming loan rate low at between 0.5 and 0.6 percent as of December last year.

He added the company’s strategy for growth this year included expanding its marketing network through partnerships with more car dealers and promoting its acc.one app.

Chief sales and marketing officer Tan Chian Hok explained that the app was targeted at urban millennials (people below 35 years of age), who accounted for 70 percent of the clientele.

Thus, the Rp-10-billion app includes certain millennial-oriented features such as a virtual assistant named Yuna and an online second-hand car bidding service called ACC Bid.

He said the app was ideal to capture millennials, because they had a habit of shopping from home thanks to e-commerce platforms.

“We see this millennial group as an important market, because many of them want to buy cars to improve their social status,” he added.

However, chief risk and IT officer Handoko Liem noted the consortium was currently more focused on gaging the app’s initial market response instead of its impact on sales and thus declined to reveal the app’s estimated effect.

He did, however, mention that the company aimed to sell 2,400 cars through its online bidding service this year, which would feed the consortium around Rp 240 billion in revenue.